Forgeries

“The likelihood that a lay reader, unexposed to the
exigencies of higher political or military responsibility, will misconstrue
the purpose of this project, and the intent of its participants, seems
obvious.”

— The Report From Iron Mountain

The Hitler Diaries are my idea of a
good textbook case of forgery — at least for the kind of textbook I
would write. The diaries had flaws that in retrospect made the discovery
of their fraudulent nature inevitable — but the feat was remarkable
nonetheless: lengthy volumes of work that were convincing enough to fool a
lot of people who should have been much more
cautious.

Another favorite of mine is the
Report From Iron Mountain:
In the form of a government think-tank report, this fabulous satire
analyzed the “possibility and desirability of peace” and found
that peace would be unhealthy to the American state for many reasons. The
satire was aimed at the U.S.
military-industrial complex from the American left-wing during the cold-war,
but it has been revived by anti-government groups on the American right-wing
in more recent years, some of whom take it to be evidence of an on-going
conspiracy rather than just a finger pointing at the conspiracy.

And speaking of things that right-wingers tend to take just a little bit too
seriously, there’s the granddaddy of these sorts of things, the
legendary Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion
— allegedly transcripts of the meeting where all of the Jews who
really run the world get together and talk about all of their evil plans
for future domination of the minds and bodies of good people everywhere.
I’m reminded of a documentary where Ugandan dictator Idi Amin told
the press that his intelligence agents had found secret Israeli military
plans, only to reveal later to the documentary crew that all he’d
found had been a copy of the
infamous Protocols.

And then there’s Clifford Irving’s “autobiography”
of Howard Hughes which unfortunately was exposed by Hughes himself before
its announced publication in 1972 — but was finally published in a
somewhat revised edition in 1999.

In North Carolina, they still believe that the locals beat those dopes in
Philadelphia to the punch in 1775 with the
Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence.
I suspect it’s political suicide in the Jesse Helms State to suggest
that the document is a fake (especially since the date that the declaration
was allegedly signed
is given top billing on the state flag),
so unsuspecting schoolchildren will be learning about the pioneering
Carolinans for decades to come…

Thomas Chatterton
(1752-1770) wrote up some fine poetry and passed it off as the 1464 work of
the “gode
prieste” Thomas Rowley. His life and works proved
inspiring
to Dante, Coleridge, Keats and others.

Of the odd schools of poetry that flourished in the early years of the
twentieth century, perhaps it is an oversight only the
Spectrists are mentioned here. But
if their hoax was only more obvious, it was also most curious and
surrounded itself with oddity.

This sort of thing is still going on. In 2001, poet David Solway
admitted that he wasn’t the translator and biographer of the Greek poet
Andreas Karavis, but his inventor.

Worthy of note also, a poetical quasi-hoax, the oeuvre of
The Sweet Singer of Michigan,
Julia A. Moore. Horrid poetry that became a hit for that very reason,
decades before people thought they invented hip irony.

Glenn Boyer got his novel
I Married Wyatt Earp
published by the University of Arizona Press as the non-fiction memoir of
the gunslinger’s third wife.

Published
recently was the account of an Italian merchant’s trip to the orient
in the 13th Century, as allegedly given in a recently-discovered
manuscript written by the man himself.

And the Scarith of Scornello shows that these sorts of things have been going on at least
since the Renaissance.

Joseph Cosey
made quite a criminal career out of lovingly recreating the handwriting of
famous Americans.
But Mark Hofmann’s many mormon forgeries
were the least of his legal troubles.

Radio host Jean Shepherd invented the book
I, Libertine and its
author, Frederick R. Ewing, and enlisted his audience to help propagate the
hoax.

Published in mid-19th Century, the
Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk
helped inflame anti-Catholic sentiments in the United States. The book
was an expose of what really happens in a Catholic convent, as told
by an escaped nun. Scandalous and very, very dirty. And of course, it was
really the work of someone with a good imagination and an anti-Catholic axe
to grind.

Jeff Edmunds posted
fake excerpts
from an unpublished work by Vladamir Nabokov that were good enough to get
Nabokov-defenders in a huff about copyright and the ethics of posthumous
publication.

There’s nothing quite so satisfying as a forgery when it’s the government’s
bureaucratese that’s being forged. For instance, there are the fun-loving
Brits who posted up signs in the bus terminals announcing:
“EXPERIMENTAL FREE TRAVEL: Due to
the sharp rise in administration and collection costs the Executive are
introducing free bus travel for an experimental period of 14 days. No fares
will be collected on any MPTE services from Monday,
3rd May to Sunday, 16th May,
1976.”

Sly, very sly. Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, felt that
the innocent verdicts in the first Rodney King beating trial were an
indication that the law did not in practice prohibit police brutality. So
he wrote up charmingly formal
announcements as though he were the government announcing this as
policy.

Here’s a wicked little hack for you: Someone forged
a piece of junk-email (a.k.a.
spam), sent it to zillions of people, but
gave the return-address of the Samsung corporation. They got thousands of
messages a day from angry spamees. “We’ve spent millions
to maintain our reputation and our brand image and we just want this to
stop,” said a company spokesperson.

Some wiseacre thought that Joseph Smith’s story about finding a new
Christian testament
engraved in a supernaturally-transmitted script on metal tablets that later
mysteriously disappeared was a little hokey, so he carved a bunch of
gobbledygook on some slabs of metal that have since become known as the
Kinderhook Plates,
and asked Smith for a translation to see how he’d reply; depending on who
you ask, well…

The
Confessions of Pontius Pilate
are one good example of a forged Christian scripture. Attributing a piece
of literature to God is just one possibility for people wanting to enter
the religion con game.

Capitalist propaganda or embarassing evidence? The
Eremin Letter
seems to provide documentation that shows Joseph Stalin worked for the
Czar’s secret police as a mole into the Communist Party.

Another useful forgery was the
Zinoviev Letter,
which came out four days before the 1924 British general election, and
is credited with knocking Labour out of power.

In the nineteenth century, Vrain Denis-Lucas “forged a total of 27,000 autographs, letters, document and manuscripts from such luminaries as Cleopatra, Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Joan of Arc, Cicero and Dante Alighieri — written in contemporary French [and] sold them to the most prominent French collectors and accumulated significant wealth of hundreds of thousands of francs.”

Perhaps more the work of random mutation and natural selection than of a
mischief-maker, was the charming, down-home, “everything
important I learned in kindergarten”-style wisdom written by
Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich that was chain-emailed around the net
again and again but attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.

Another beloved popular tale of Native American wisdom,
The Education of Little Tree: A True Story,
was actually written by an enthusiastic white supremacist. Yep — the same
man who wrote George Wallace’s “Segregation
Forever!” speech wrote the much-beloved story of the noble
red man.